Spinning a Yarn, Part 1

June. Summer Vacation. The annual wool and fiber show. Let's take a road trip! My wife, being an avid wool spinner/dyer/knitter/teacher, wanted to take the rest of us on her second annual adventure up to Eugene, Oregon, to a big 3-day sheep/wool/processing/selling convention, called "The Black Sheep Gathering"... probably one of the biggest of its kind on the West Coast. We would also do a number of other things on the way up and back, like visit my sister who moved up to Oregon recently, visit some of my music buddies, tour a wildlife rescue center, see a honey-processing plant... and since I'm involved, we would be taking LOTS of video along the way. Well, the trip was a huge success, we all had a grand time and met wonderful people along the way, and now I have mountains of raw video footage to assemble into segments of our trip. The main goal was to do some preliminary shoots of the Black Sheep event itself, vendors, competitions, judging, get interviews... and put together some videos that would give a flavor for what goes on there, since not many people know about this.

Well, after a month of video editing, the first movie is now available. This is a 9 minute interview, as a high-level overview of many of the events that go on here. I spent a lot of time arranging the background video during the interview to show what Peggy (the speaker) was talking about. She talks about the judging events, the sheep and goats, the competitions, and some history. I am offering these videos to the BSG volunteers, in case they may want to use them on their web site to help get more interest in their event.



The next videos I will work on will focus on more specific events and vendors. I also have really intriguing videos of the bee/honey farm, and of the wildlife rescue center... those are coming up next!

As if, from a dream...

Here is another quick glimpse at ideas from my huge "Fractal Serenity" music video project, still in progress. This particular music-video is a "character study" of one of the strange plants that grows in this dream... the "Glass Orchid".

The tasty cherry color was used on the petals, after chatting with the marvelous musician Hoon, who mentioned his love of that particular candy-like color. The "Fractal Serenity" music, was initially completely computer-generated, then I massaged and re-wrote areas by hand to soften some of the rough edges, and this harsh-and-soft dreamy music will be lengthened and reworked into the soundscape for the full-length music video of the same name.

The computer graphics were hand-coded in the C-like computer text language of the freeware POV-Ray ray-tracer software... I still don't use modelers, but instead type this all up by hand.

And as always, there's a bit of (Russian) wordplay in the title. I hope you enjoy the surreal dreamy ride!

What makes you salivate?

Chocolate, perhaps? How about some beautifully cooked bacon?

Hold that thought...

This movie is an out-take from a recent sheep-shearing movie my wife and I took back in April... (posted in the prior blog entry below.)

It turns out that there is not much to do while the sheep shearer does his thing, so everyone else just stands around and talks between sheep-grabs.

So... please listen to the silly conversational banter we were having (over the wind noise) in the beginning of this movie. Now fast-forward to a couple of months later, when this local news video pops up, and my wife and I are floored, they actually made this concoction we joked about and took it to the fair! And people are eating it! How funny.

Annual haircut... for sheep

My wife and I headed out east to Descanso to a small farm in April (annual sheep shearing time), and as my wife bought some of the fleeces for herself and friends to wash and spin into yarn, I took some video of this interesting process that not many people out here know about. Wool yarn just shows up on the rack at Walmart, right? Well, not quite... there's a lot of work involved in wrestling down a 400 pound sheep, holding her steady and giving her a haircut. And then there's the washing and combing and dying and spinning of the wool, but those are future videos. For now, let's shear some sheep.

Elephant Seals

Sorry about that, life happened for a while there, and I have neglected my blog! One of the places my wife and I stopped at, while driving to Big Sur and back along Highway 1 on the California coast, was "Elephant Seal Beach", near San Simeon. In the Winter, the females give birth to their pups, and you get some great close-up opportunities (with a nice zoom lens, anyway) of these amazing creatures. The following video shows some of the adult males bellowing, and some of the females re-positioning themselves to protect the babies, and even a pup just born, umbilical cord still attached.



Movie Shot with a Canon GL2 video camera. Music "Quixotic Dreams" by schwansongs.com

Hope you enjoy!

New Spacey Music Video for fun

The talented Macjammer Reinholt56 wrote an intriguing ambient piece of music here called "Cosmic Symphony", and when I heard it, various abstract colorful images started floating in my head... so I asked him if it would be OK for me to capture these images as a music video, and he graciously agreed. After a couple of days of designing and laying out the coordinates, I started my computer on the task of creating over 4,000 images (at 640x480) for the movie. 4 days of continuous image-rendering later (with all 4 CPUs cranked at 99%), the movie is ready for viewing here. I hope you like it. I have also made the high-quality 640x480 QuickTime movie available for direct-download too, it is crystal clear and there are details in it that you cannot see in the Google/YouTube videos below. Here is the high-quality version of the movie: 'control-click' or 'right-click' here to download this as a (QuickTime movie) file, and play locally on your computer. Note that it is 284 MB, which will take quite some time to download. But if you are interested in a crisp movie, this is the one to get.

If you wish to leave a comment on the video itself, click here. Or comment here in the blog... I would be very interested in your thoughts on the music video, positive and negative!

ttfn,
Drakonis


(Google's video seems a bit clearer)


(YouTube's video is a little blurry)

Renaissance Faire Videos

My wife and I enjoy escaping, sometimes far into the past, and donning 500 year old garb and visiting the local Renaissance Faire near us. My wife is an avid wool spinner/knitter/crocheter, and while she was giving demonstrations, I decided to bring my video camera and ask if some of the wonderful musicians would like to have their performance video-taped. Despite the fact that it was about 90 degrees and extremely windy, I was able to set up and record a couple.

The first was the Cottager Minstrels, Mary and Trevor Hamer, who performed a couple of wonderful songs here:

They also are working on their own album of music, and can be found here on MySpace.

The second was "Vox Nobili", a Madrigal ensemble that is a joy to listen to. I had heard them on previous occasions at the faire, and was looking forward to working with them to capture a bit of their magic sound:

Vox Nobili are:
Sopranos:  Tara Pool, Liz Lindenfeld, Angelica Marcu, Barbara Young
Altos:  Susan Abernethy,  Sally Dexter-Smith
Tenor:  Jerry Marcu
Basses:  Vincent Martin,  Richard Smith
They can be hired to perform in garb for various special occasions, see their web site here.

Finally, as a bit of a dare from some of my friends (who can actually PLAY instruments), I recorded myself strumming away on my Mountain Dulcimer "Dulce", showing that I really do only know a couple of chords.

Nice leather vest, huh! Stop watching me try to play... oh, look at my socks! Those are hand spun and hand dyed wool socks that my wife made for me! There, the music is over, thank goodness!